It is generally accepted that divine service affords a legitimate opportunity for the congregation to assess not only the appearance, deportment, elegance and possible wealth of new arrivals to the pa...
If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
Dictating condolences to the mother of a murdered husband whom you’ve been busily cuckolding for the last three years would take more than his limited social vocabulary.
Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.
Find depressing his determination to make his characters suffer even when a little common sense on both his part and theirs could avoid it. Tess is one of the most irritating young women in Victorian...
The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held...
She would not wish anyone violently dead but, since it had happened, one might as well make the most of it.
He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part co...
. . equality is a political theory not a practical policy. . .
We have all sinned, Mr. Darcy, and we cannot look for mercy without showing it in our lives.
The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.
The attempt to analyse was, of course, an attempt at exorcism.
That's one of the frustrations of this job. You meet people, question them, get intrigued by them, eliminate them from inquiries and never see them again.
She was wearing a hat heavily trimmed with crisp pink ribbons which looked new, bought no doubt as tribute to the importance of the occasion. It would have been more impressive had it not sat atop a b...
Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.
Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience--that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hu...
We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words justice, compassion,...